News, Commentary and Insights from the Flash Player and AIR Product and Engineering Teams

Author Archive: Chris Campbell

Linux users have access to both NPAPI and PPAPI versions of Flash Player. However, for the last four years, the NPAPI version has been held at 11.2 and regularly updated with only security fixes while the PPAPI version (used in Chrome and Chromium based browsers), is in line with the standard Windows and Mac releases.

Today we are updating the beta channel with Linux NPAPI Flash Player by moving it forward and in sync with the modern release branch (currently version 23). We have done this significant change to improve security and provide additional mitigation to the Linux community.

In the past, we communicated that NPAPI Linux releases would stop in 2017. This is no longer the case and once we have performed sufficient testing and received community feedback, we will release both NPAPI and PPAPI Linux builds with their major version numbers in sync and on a regular basis.

Because this change is primarily a security initiative, some features (like GPU 3D acceleration and premium video DRM) will not be fully implemented.

If you require this functionality, we recommend that you use the PPAPI version of Flash Player. That said, we believe that the new NPAPI build represents a significant step forward in functionality, stability, and security and look forward to hearing your feedback.

Currently we are distributing 32 and 64 bit binaries only, we will package these in proper installers after additional testing and feedback. Users should manually back-up their existing Flash Player plugin file from the appropriate system plug-in folder and copy the new binaries into place to use them. Please note that our initial release does not support Fedora based distributions. For more information, see our release notes.

Have you been looking for ways to improve your mobile testing? I’ve recently seen a demonstration from the folks at TestFairy and was blown away at the level of integration and functionality that they’ve made available to developers. If you’re looking to improve the quality of the bug reports that you receive from your testers and you want easy integration into your AIR application, definitely check out TestFairy to see what they have to offer. There are both free and paid plans available.

Check out the video below to see how easy it is to use and implement in your application! The TestFairy ANE can be downloaded here.

Congratulations to Josh Tynjala and the Feathers open source project for the release of Feathers UI 2.3.0! Feathers offers a large collection of ActionScript user interface components and layouts for mobile and desktop. Feathers is powered by both the Starling Framework and Adobe AIR.

What’s new in this release?

In version 2.3.0, Feathers UI includes a new DateTimeSpinner component and a number of powerful new features that have long been requested by the community.

The DateTimeSpinner component is a mobile-style date and time picker built with a series of SpinnerList components.

List and GroupedList now support the ability to display more than one type of item renderer in the same list. It’s now easy to style the first or last item renderer differently or to choose the type of item renderer based on the values of an item’s properties.

TextureCache makes it possible to reuse textures loaded from URLs, instead of potentially recreating them multiple times. It’s perfect for lists that need to display many images. TextureCache can save bandwidth, but watch out because it can require more memory.

Text renderers now support the ability to automatically change font styles when their parent component changes to different states. For instance, a text renderer used by a Button component can now detect when the button is being pressed, and the color of the text will be updated. Unlike previous APIs like downLabelProperties and hoverLabelProperties, this new approach can be more strictly type-checked by the compiler, leading to fewer mistakes in your code. Additionally, this feature can be used by other components with states, such as a TextInput (which may be focused or disabled).

Finally, this version also includes a new TopcoatLightMobileTheme, which is based on a contribution by Marcel Piestansky.

Example

Let’s look at a quick example of using a TextureCache class with a List:

In the code above, every ImageLoader that appears in the List will share the same TextureCache. As the List scrolls, the newly loaded textures will be saved, but existing textures will be borrowed from the cache.

We’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of Flash Player and AIR version 20! With this December release, we’ve added new features, important security updates and functional bug fixes for our customers. Full details on this release can be found in our release notes and security bulletin.

Updates for Flash Player 20 have automatically started rolling out to those that have enabled “Allow Adobe to install updates (recommended)”. If you’ve opted into this auto update mechanism there’s no work required on your end. Over the next 24 hours we’ll be pushing this update out silently and automatically to computers connected to the internet.

Customers using Google Chrome or Windows 8.x/10 Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge will receive the update through the Google and Microsoft update mechanisms.

Last week we made some excitingannouncements around Flash Professional, now Adobe Animate CC, and a new partnership for the Flash Runtime. The future is very bright for the Animate CC team and for the designers and developers that use this tool. The changes and improvements they’ve made and have planned for 2016 are inspiring and we’re more than confident that they will continue to deliver the innovation that our customers need to succeed.

On the Flash Runtime side, we’re thrilled to announce our partnership with Facebook. We know that our customers and developers rely on Flash content to work securely and reliably. With this new partnership with Facebook, our ongoing collaboration with both Google and Microsoft, and our close work with Apple, Mozilla, Opera and others, we’re committed more than ever to making the Flash Runtime secure, reliable, and compatible for everyone.

As we close out 2015, Flash Player enjoys amazing ubiquity with full support from every major browser and operating system in use today. Flash Player is built into every version of Google Chrome and ChromeOS. Flash Player comes as part of both the Windows 8 and Windows 10 operating systems and works seamlessly with both Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge. Flash Player has full support from Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera. This unprecedented level of support allows our developers to be successful and our customers to enjoy the content they want to use, view, and play. We look forward to great things to come in 2016 and we wish everyone a happy new year!

If you hadn’t noticed, we updated both Flash Player and AIR last Tuesday (11/10) with new builds focusing on security and important bug fixes. Flash Player was updated to 19.0.0.245 and AIR is now at 19.0.0.241. AIR developers, please note that the AIR SDK and runtime were updated with a refresh of the embedded Flash Player plugin only.

But that’s not all! November was our last scheduled v19 release and we’re now on track for a December launch of v20! Head on over to Adobe Labs to pick up the latest Flash Player and AIR betas. Make sure to check out the new AIR beta features like Android TV support, secure socket for iOS, and 64-bit support for OSX (Windows coming soon). On the Flash Player side we’ve got improved PPAPI printing and now Windows 8/10 access to hardware acceleration options. Full details in the release notes.

A great deal of flash content, which works in Internet Explorer 10 or earlier, may behave incorrectly with Microsoft’s latest browsers. This blog post will list technical differences to help developers debug why their site might be broken in Internet Explorer 11 or Microsoft Edge. This is truly a deep dive into the workings of Flash Player and browser detection.

For those that merely want our recommended best practice to embed Flash Player in your HTML code, the answer is simply use SwfObject 2.3. Documentation can be found in the README on GitHub and on the Google Code pages. If you use SwfObject 2.3, you can have high confidence that your content will load appropriately with all modern browsers.

If you are interested in learning more, make sure to check out the remainder of the article after the break.

Huge thanks to Peter Grandmaison and Jeromie Clark for their encyclopedic knowledge and guidance putting this post together.

We’ve updated Flash Player with important security updates today. For everyone enrolled in our auto update system (highly recommended), you’ll be automatically and silently updated within 24 hours. For more details on this release, please see our security bulletin and release notes linked below.

Today the team has released our scheduled October update for Flash Player and AIR. Flash Player 19 has received important bug and security fixes and the AIR runtime and SDK were updated to refresh the embedded version of Flash Player with today’s release.

I hope those of you that attended MAX this year had a great time! I enjoyed meeting everyone and was blown away by the work being done by our teams and customers.

One final item. For those targeting iOS 9 and interested in universal links, please take a look at the release notes. You’ll find detailed instructions on how to go about using these with the latest AIR SDK.

Where has the year gone? We had an incredibly busy summer and now, with the days shortening here in California and the season about to end, Flash Player and AIR 19 have been released!

Our focus remains strong and our dedication to our customers is absolute. We’re committed to the security of the internet and those that use our runtimes. We’re also prioritizing the needs of our development community and providing the features and support you need to be successful.

I hope to see some of you at MAX this year. If you’re planning on attending, please let me know if you’d like to sync up!

For more details on today’s release, please visit our Flash Player or AIR announcement pages, or just head on over to our release notes for the full details. The feature highlights can be found below.

iOS Concurrency

Our popular desktop and Android feature, AIR Workers, is now making its debut on iOS! We have added support on iOS devices so that you will be able to execute code in the background without interrupting your application’s main code. Your UI will remain responsive, enhancing the user experience!

New insertAt() and removeAt() Vector and Array APIs

With Flash Player and AIR 19, we have introduced two new APIs for element insertion or removal in Vector and Arrays. They are implemented to perform better than existing splice method when used for single element.

Improved Stage3D Error Messages

We’ve added new Stage3D error codes to provide developers with additional debugging and error information. We have also updated the AS3 documentation for various Stage3D APIs to provide more information about the reasons for the errors thrown.

Added ability to disable browser zoom factor scaling via HTML

In Flash Player 15, we added code to improve the resolution of Stage3D content when the browser’s zoom factor (BZF) was changed. This was extended to the PPAPI and Windows XP/Vista/7 Active X control in Flash Player 18. In Flash Player 19, we’re providing the developer the ability to enabled or disabled this functionality.

BZF is turned on by default but can now be turn on/off by setting a new attribute “browserzoom” to either “scale” or “noscale” in HTML EMBEDSWF and OBJECT tags.

iOS 9 Compatibility

We’ve run through a full certification pass and verified that AIR applications work on last week’s iOS9 release. Look for new iOS 9 specific features in upcoming releases!